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Document Versioning in Couchbase

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Couchbase Server does out of the box not support document revisions but it would be quite simple to implement it on the application side. This article describes ways how to do this. The following topics are covered: Handling concurrent access Relevant attributes One document per version Embedded revision tree Combined approaches  Handling concurrent access In a context of versioning multiple users/threads are creating new versions (and this maybe nearly the same time). So I think it makes sense to spot a light on concurrent access before we talk about versioning approaches. You will most probably need to combine concurrency handling with versioning.  Couchbase supports 2 ways of handling concurrent access to the same document.  C(ompare) A(nd) S(wap): This is the optimistic approach. Each document has a built-in property which is the CAS-value. The CAS-value changes as soon as somebody updates the document. So the idea is to implement something like the following on th

How many Buckets?

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In Couchbase the equivalent of a database is called a bucket. A bucket is basically a data container which is split into 1024 partitions, the so called vBuckets. Each partition is stored as a Couchstore file on disk and the partitioning is also reflected in memory. Each configured replica leads to additional 1024 replica vBuckets. So if you have a bucket with 1 replica configured then this bucket has 1024 active vBuckets and 1024 replica vBuckets. The vBuckets are spread across the cluster nodes. So in a 2 node cluster each node would have 512 active vBuckets. In a n-node cluster each node would by default have nearly 1024/n vBuckets. An often asked question is 'How many Buckets should I create?'. There are multiple aspects to take into account here. Max. possible number of Buckets Logical data separation Load separation Physical data separation Multi-tenancy Max. possible number of Buckets Before we start talking about why it might make sense to use mult